"A tiny bit of civil disobedience," that with any luck, won't get folks in trouble.

In a matter of seconds, you too can "liberate" an old academic article from JSTOR.

On Monday afternoon, a group of online archivists released the "Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator." The initiative is a JavaScript-based bookmarklet that lets Internet users "liberate" an article, already in the public domain, from the online academic archive JSTOR. By running the script—which is limited to once per browser—a public domain academic article is downloaded to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies.

Swartz, who tragically committed suicide on January 11, 2013, was arrested and charged back in 2009 for having downloaded a massive cache of documents from the website. He faced criminal charges that could have lead to potentially months or years in a prison as a result (they were only dropped this morning). JSTOR did not immediately respond to requests for comment concerning this new tool. However, over the weekend, the organization did acknowledge it was "deeply saddened" by the Swartz tragedy.

"The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge," the organization wrote in an unsigned, undated statement. "At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."

"If you are scared about violating a TOS, then don't violate TOS."

Jason Scott, of ArchiveTeam, developed the piece of code to provide a way for Swartz’ supporters to engage in a small act of digital civil disobedience. He said his organization had planned this tool last year, but decided not to release it so as not to interfere with Swartz’ then-pending case.

"I would be really sad if I was indicted and sent to jail for this," he told Ars, noting that all the documents he and his supporters were "liberating" were already in the public domain. Scott argued that JSTOR had no right to impose additional restrictions on how these public domain articles were accessed, or what they were used for.

"It is to remind people of the threshold [Swartz] crossed, he would do things that were a little bit questionable, for good reasons," Scott added. "He would make leaps that were a little farther beyond and he did it during his young life. If it brings a little attention to him and how he lived in the world, [then that’s a good thing]. Even if it's a very tiny [act of protest]—that's not meant to destroy or damage JSTOR or anything like that."

JSTOR’s terms of service [TOS], for example, explicitly prohibit any "attempt to override, circumvent, or disable any encryption features or software protections employed in the JSTOR Platform;" and "undertake coordinated or systematic activity between or among two or more individuals and/or entities that, in the aggregate, constitutes downloading and/or distributing a significant portion of the Content," among other prohibitions.

"We absolutely don't recommend that people do this—don't do it," Scott said. "If you don’t want to do this, don't do it. If you are scared about violating a TOS, then don't violate TOS."

121 Reader Comments

One could imagine using an open-source, friendly virus to get rid of the barriers to progress created by JSTOR and JSTOR-like entities:

1- Payload of the virus: a background process downloading journal papers, sending them to P2P networks.2- Important: the virus should have low contagion. The goal is that most people would download it themselves, but can maintain plausible deniability if needed.

"We absolutely don't recommend that people do this—don't do it," Scott said. "If you don’t want to do this, don't do it. If you are scared about violating a TOS, then don't violate TOS.

"... but if you do, the responsibility is entirely on you, even though I'm giving you the tool to do it and am implicitly encouraging you to do it. Have fun breaking the law, kids!"

Which law?

Technically, I think connecting to a network with intention of violating their TOS could be considered computer fraud. Just like what Swartz was charged with.

Actually Swarts was charged with gaining unauthorized access. He bypassed the system's security illegally which is a federal crime. He wasn't arrested because he went into the system with copyright infringement in mind. Even though this fool had normal access to the files he chose to access the system illegally. He knew what he was doing was illegal else he wouldn't have been trying to hide what he was doing.

Swartz is a hero, not because he broke the law: we all do that. He is a hero because he did so in pursuit of the public interest. He is a hero because he had the courage to pursue an ideal, while so many others avert their eyes from the the public good, preferring to defend the private interests of themselves or the powerful.

Suppose I break into your house, steal all your money and vauables, and rather than keeping it, I give all the proceeds to the poor. Would you be OK with that? After all, I'm only doing it in the "public interest" (as I define it) rather than a private interest.

"We absolutely don't recommend that people do this—don't do it," Scott said. "If you don’t want to do this, don't do it. If you are scared about violating a TOS, then don't violate TOS.

"... but if you do, the responsibility is entirely on you, even though I'm giving you the tool to do it and am implicitly encouraging you to do it. Have fun breaking the law, kids!"

Copyright infringement is NOT a criminal act. If it were the people caught sharing copyrighted material would be facing criminal charges in court not civil charges. It becomes a criminal act when you turn a profit from it. That's when it goes from simple copyright violation to actual piracy.

He is accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of its terms of use, and of evading MIT's efforts to stop him from doing so...It's not clear, then, whether this was an attempt to liberate the documents from behind the JSTOR paywall or whether he was intending to use the documents for a personal research project.

Schwartz downloads 4.8 milliion documents and the story's author says, "uh, he might have been doing a research project...uh, we don't know." Come on man! 4.8 million scholarly articles and Tim Lee plants the seed that Schwartz might have been doing a pet research project?

The term 'public domain' seems to be a bit of a misnomer. If 'it' is in public domain, then how come JSTOR is the only site that has them. Shouldn't it be wildly available from a couple of other sites as well? And if it is not, then perhaps it is wrong to call them public domain.

He is accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of its terms of use, and of evading MIT's efforts to stop him from doing so...It's not clear, then, whether this was an attempt to liberate the documents from behind the JSTOR paywall or whether he was intending to use the documents for a personal research project.

No he violated federal law when he hacked into MIT's network instead of simply going in via the front door which he actually did have access to. This seems to be lost on people like you. The feds wouldn't have been involved if he simply used his valid login to gain access to the system. The feds didn't give a shit about his violating copyright. Copyright violation is a CIVIL matter. Hacking into a computer/network is a FEDERAL CRIME. He wouldn't have been facing a possible 30+ year federal prison sentence if he didn't hack their system. This would have been a non-issue. This guy, for all his smarts, did something incredibly stupid. Even the way he hacked the system was asinine. He might as well have been asking to be caught hacking the system.

One could imagine using an open-source, friendly virus to get rid of the barriers to progress created by JSTOR and JSTOR-like entities:

1- Payload of the virus: a background process downloading journal papers, sending them to P2P networks.2- Important: the virus should have low contagion. The goal is that most people would download it themselves, but can maintain plausible deniability if needed.

Hmmm, yes. Defense, counter-defense. Problem is that technology empowers both sides, and with other inequalities in mind, it usually leads to an escalation of hostilities.

One could imagine using an open-source, friendly virus to get rid of the barriers to progress created by JSTOR and JSTOR-like entities:

1- Payload of the virus: a background process downloading journal papers, sending them to P2P networks.2- Important: the virus should have low contagion. The goal is that most people would download it themselves, but can maintain plausible deniability if needed.

Scanning a bunch of paper documents and making them available online is not a "barrier to progress." It is, in fact, progress.

He is accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of its terms of use, and of evading MIT's efforts to stop him from doing so...It's not clear, then, whether this was an attempt to liberate the documents from behind the JSTOR paywall or whether he was intending to use the documents for a personal research project.

Schwartz downloads 4.8 milliion documents and the story's author says, "uh, he might have been doing a research project...uh, we don't know." Come on man! 4.8 million scholarly articles and Tim Lee plants the seed that Schwartz might have been doing a pet research project?

Edit: I guess I should be clear: Assuming that the articles he downloaded were in the public domain, that means the only thing he did wrong was *accessing* the documents improperly. Once he had the documents, there was nothing wrong with distributing them (since the documents are in the public domain it infringes no copyright). So it really doesn't matter whether he was planning to share them or not.

He is accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of its terms of use, and of evading MIT's efforts to stop him from doing so...It's not clear, then, whether this was an attempt to liberate the documents from behind the JSTOR paywall or whether he was intending to use the documents for a personal research project.

Schwartz downloads 4.8 milliion documents and the story's author says, "uh, he might have been doing a research project...uh, we don't know." Come on man! 4.8 million scholarly articles and Tim Lee plants the seed that Schwartz might have been doing a pet research project?

Edit: I guess I should be clear: Assuming that the articles he downloaded were in the public domain, that means the only thing he did wrong was *accessing* the documents improperly. Once he had the documents, there was nothing wrong with distributing them (since the documents are in the public domain it infringes no copyright). So it really doesn't matter whether he was planning to share them or not.

One simple fact you are ignorant of or you are pretending not to be aware of. The guy had a VALID login to access MIT's system LEGALLY. If all he wanted was access for research he could have simply logged in like everyone else.

If these documents are already in the public domain, then why the restrictions?

Because that's not what JSTOR does. They take publications organize, allow you to do very detailed searches, and download right from them if you pay for their services. Think of it like going into barnes and nobles and buying a copy of Dante's Inferno. The book is in the public domain but you are paying for the paper, formatting, etc.

Edit before the barrage of downvotes: I'm not commenting whether they are right or wrong in not just letting people download them for free. The amount of bandwidth they'd actually use in minimal. Just pointing out they provide a service as well.

Google scholar does exactly the same thing, and does it better.Arxiv does less --- but everything they provide is free. And no-one gives a damn about the lack of power-searching because, like normal people, they search through Google.

If JSTOR REALLY cared about making these papers freely available, they would either donate the corpus to Google Scholar, or run on it as a bare-bones arxiv type model.

What part of illegally attaching to a network is hard for people to understand? Yes, he was a genius. Yes, he created great technologies. Yes, he was a criminal.

He walked into a network closet and attached an unauthorized computer to a private network. Whether you think the articles should be freely available to any and all is irrelevant! We are a nation of LAWS, and HE BROKE THEM. Stop making him out to be a hero for this.

He committed these crimes to make a point, ala The Boston Tea Party (a week but still somewhat valid comparison). The DOJ also did what they did to make a point, i.e., computer crime is STILL CRIME. These people who call themselves hacktivists, anonymous, social engineers, etc., are by and large criminals committing crimes. Many of them are the modern day version of the back ally street thug, preying on people too stupid to not click a phishing link. They are not heroes. They are not a romanticized modern-day Robin Hood. No matter what they might do for good on occasion does not erase the crimes they commit.

Aaron was playing with fire. He burned himself. And there's the end of it. He burned HIMSELF. No one made him break into the network closet and attach his unauthorized computer to the private network. No one made him take his own life. It's tragic. It's awful. But it's on him.

So do think the same thing about, to take a relevant example, Alan Turing?

Stupid man --- he knew homosexuality was illegal, but he still did it! And then he was dumb enough to commit suicide rather than accept some jail time. Doesn't sound like a genius to me...

IF JSTOR are providing metadata that are actually valuable to scholars, but not to amateurs, then an obvious business model would be:- provide the PAPERS to the world for free and - charge universities for the METADATA.

He is accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of its terms of use, and of evading MIT's efforts to stop him from doing so...It's not clear, then, whether this was an attempt to liberate the documents from behind the JSTOR paywall or whether he was intending to use the documents for a personal research project.

Schwartz downloads 4.8 milliion documents and the story's author says, "uh, he might have been doing a research project...uh, we don't know." Come on man! 4.8 million scholarly articles and Tim Lee plants the seed that Schwartz might have been doing a pet research project?

Edit: I guess I should be clear: Assuming that the articles he downloaded were in the public domain, that means the only thing he did wrong was *accessing* the documents improperly. Once he had the documents, there was nothing wrong with distributing them (since the documents are in the public domain it infringes no copyright). So it really doesn't matter whether he was planning to share them or not.

One simple fact you are ignorant of or you are pretending not to be aware of. The guy had a VALID login to access MIT's system LEGALLY. If all he wanted was access for research he could have simply logged in like everyone else.

I don't remember the exact events, but I know at one point JSTOR threatened to cut MIT's access if they didn't stop him. MIT usually runs a very open network, but after that, they banned his MAC. So he couldn't just log in. That said, it's questionable whether anything he did to MIT was illegal, and it certainly wasn't a federal crime. The only reason the feds got involved was that accessing JSTOR crossed state lines.

....The rule of law cannot be sustained by granting it unconditional supremacy. No law can be too big to fail.

Swartz is a hero, not because he broke the law: we all do that. He is a hero because he did so in pursuit of the public interest. He is a hero because he had the courage to pursue an ideal, while so many others avert their eyes from the the public good, preferring to defend the private interests of themselves or the powerful....

There were a lot of ways Swartz could have pursued the public interest in this particular instance. Willfully breaking the law was the avenue he chose and he faced charges for it.

I guess you think the same thing about Rosa Parks. Should have jailed that damn uppity bitch for breaking the law --- maybe 6 months in prison would have made her rethink her attitude towards the world?

While I agree that the death of Aaron Swartz is tragic, and that it's not just for him to have been threatened with such penalties, he decided to take his own life. Had to waited, went through the process of being tried, had continued to champion this cause, he might have never served a day in prison.

So do think the same thing about, to take a relevant example, Alan Turing?

Stupid man --- he knew homosexuality was illegal, but he still did it! And then he was dumb enough to commit suicide rather than accept some jail time. Doesn't sound like a genius to me...

We need some way to enforce the law. If everyone who was being threatened with jail time committed suicide because of the stress, you might have a point. No one caused Aaron to commit suicide. Aaron had not been convicted and it's plausible the court would have found him innocent; the justic system hadn't even had time to fail him yet. You can't say that the prosecutor, MIT, or JSTOR are murderers.

This might not be the most popular view, but I cannot understand why people complain about the cost of scientific journals and similar. Readers-pay is a necessary part of getting a sound review process in place that publishes good research. This is not evil or denying the public anything, it is just a necessary part of the academic process and it has never really been a problem in the past.

This is absolute nonsense. In the fields of physics, math, and astronomy it has been standard, for about twenty years now, to deposit papers at arxiv.org, where they are accessible for free. Papers that are not deposited in this was are considered suspect, the product of someone who is scared to have their work widely read.

Papers are SET by the author (using TeX). Papers are REVIEWED by others in the field, for free.

There is fsckall value that a journal is adding that actually costs very much. If anything, journals make papers worse because they insist on obsolete rules which limit what papers can contain (eg - limits on length, so you can't include a huge data dump in the paper- limits on the size and use of color in diagrams- limits on the use of new non-standard (but superior) notation- inability to include other presentation modalities --- videos, interactive apps, 3D models)

In November 2011 Google announced that Knol would be phased out. Content could be exported by owners to the WordPress-based Annotum. Knol was closed on April 30, 2012, and all content was deleted by October 1, 2012.

JSTOR was founded to be a shared digital archive serving the scholarly community. We understand the value of the scholarship and other material in the archives and that the future accessibility of this content is essential.

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Third-party stewardship planning

The archives must continue to be preserved in the extremely unlikely event that JSTOR should cease operations. In this case, funds may be transferred to a third-party steward. Third-party digital repositories would be selected for their high technical standards, the ability to foster cooperation among stakeholders while maintaining knowledge of the legal environment, and scrupulous digital rights management. Finally, selected repositories would have to demonstrate a strong commitment to preservation, as well as financial stability.

IF JSTOR are providing metadata that are actually valuable to scholars, but not to amateurs, then an obvious business model would be:- provide the PAPERS to the world for free and - charge universities for the METADATA.

It's up to them to decide what's their funding model. I am sure they if you contact them, they would be stunned by this brilliant idea and adopt it.

For all JSTOR's fault in search function, at least they don't have this problem.

Incorrect field detection — Google Scholar has problems identifying publications on the arXiv preprint server correctly. Interpunctuation characters in titles produce wrong search results, and authors are assigned to wrong papers, which leads to erroneous additional search results. Some search results are even given without any comprehensible reason.

I don't know about you, but I think accurate metadata on identify the author(s), title and other information of a paper correctly is useful to scholar and lay person alike.

So do think the same thing about, to take a relevant example, Alan Turing?

Stupid man --- he knew homosexuality was illegal, but he still did it! And then he was dumb enough to commit suicide rather than accept some jail time. Doesn't sound like a genius to me...

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I guess you think the same thing about Rosa Parks. Should have jailed that damn uppity bitch for breaking the law --- maybe 6 months in prison would have made her rethink her attitude towards the world?

I think you need to check your premise. Schwartz wasn't being prosecuted for some inescapable trait of his physical person. Unless of course you're trying to argue that a predisposition towards criminality is an inescapable trait (like homosexuality or race). Is that what you're getting at?

So do think the same thing about, to take a relevant example, Alan Turing?

Stupid man --- he knew homosexuality was illegal, but he still did it! And then he was dumb enough to commit suicide rather than accept some jail time. Doesn't sound like a genius to me...

Quote:

I guess you think the same thing about Rosa Parks. Should have jailed that damn uppity bitch for breaking the law --- maybe 6 months in prison would have made her rethink her attitude towards the world?

I think you need to check your premise. Schwartz wasn't being prosecuted for some inescapable trait of his physical person. Unless of course you're trying to argue that a predisposition towards criminality is an inescapable trait (like homosexuality or race). Is that what you're getting at?

Rosa Parks wasn't prosecuted for being black, she was prosecuted for breaking the law. You people are arguing that anyone who ever breaks the law, whatever the law, whatever their motivation, deserves jail time.

So do think the same thing about, to take a relevant example, Alan Turing?

Stupid man --- he knew homosexuality was illegal, but he still did it! And then he was dumb enough to commit suicide rather than accept some jail time. Doesn't sound like a genius to me...

Quote:

I guess you think the same thing about Rosa Parks. Should have jailed that damn uppity bitch for breaking the law --- maybe 6 months in prison would have made her rethink her attitude towards the world?

I think you need to check your premise. Schwartz wasn't being prosecuted for some inescapable trait of his physical person. Unless of course you're trying to argue that a predisposition towards criminality is an inescapable trait (like homosexuality or race). Is that what you're getting at?

Rosa Parks wasn't prosecuted for being black, she was prosecuted for breaking the law. You people are arguing that anyone who ever breaks the law, whatever the law, whatever their motivation, deserves jail time.

No shit! But the law said she had to sit in the back because she was black. Turing was prosecuted because it came out that he was gay. In these cases the laws had to do with inescapable attributes that neither Parks or Turing had a choice in or could do anything about. That's what make them civil rights issues. Schwartz was prosecuted because______________ (fill in the blank). Get it?

So do think the same thing about, to take a relevant example, Alan Turing?

Stupid man --- he knew homosexuality was illegal, but he still did it! And then he was dumb enough to commit suicide rather than accept some jail time. Doesn't sound like a genius to me...

Quote:

I guess you think the same thing about Rosa Parks. Should have jailed that damn uppity bitch for breaking the law --- maybe 6 months in prison would have made her rethink her attitude towards the world?

I think you need to check your premise. Schwartz wasn't being prosecuted for some inescapable trait of his physical person. Unless of course you're trying to argue that a predisposition towards criminality is an inescapable trait (like homosexuality or race). Is that what you're getting at?

Rosa Parks wasn't prosecuted for being black, she was prosecuted for breaking the law. You people are arguing that anyone who ever breaks the law, whatever the law, whatever their motivation, deserves jail time.

No shit! But the law said she had to sit in the back because she was black. Turing was prosecuted because it came out that he was gay. In these cases the laws had to do with inescapable attributes that neither Parks or Turing had a choice in or could do anything about. That's what make them civil rights issues. Schwartz was prosecuted because______________ (fill in the blank). Get it?

Quit trying to poison the well with specious comparisons

I didn't say this was a civil rights issue. I pointed out that there ARE laws for which resisting the law is valid and nobel behavior --- a point you have now conceded is true. You you have admitted that your original claim, that anyone who ever breaks the law, whatever the law, whatever their motivation, deserves jail time, is bullshit. You can say, if you like, that THIS particular infraction of the law, deserves jail time, but that's not what you were originally claiming.

(I would raise comparable NON-CIVIL-RIGHTS issues, like breaking and entering to establish that ecological crimes are being committed, or releasing supposedly secret information --- Pentagon Paper, or Bradley Manning for example. But I suspect, given everything you've said, that you figure Ellsberg and Manning both deserve to rot in prison; and that if a company wants to release toxins into the wild, and can hide doing so behind a locked fence then you are just fine with them doing so.)

If these documents are already in the public domain, then why the restrictions?

Because that's not what JSTOR does. They take publications organize, allow you to do very detailed searches, and download right from them if you pay for their services. Think of it like going into barnes and nobles and buying a copy of Dante's Inferno. The book is in the public domain but you are paying for the paper, formatting, etc.

Edit before the barrage of downvotes: I'm not commenting whether they are right or wrong in not just letting people download them for free. The amount of bandwidth they'd actually use in minimal. Just pointing out they provide a service as well.

Exactly. This is just like any other service, like Westlaw, for example. Sure, you can get those court documents, articles and decrees elsewhere and for free, but the fact that they not only aggregate all of this information for you but organize it so that searching for it won't be so unpleasant (and time consuming) makes it a valuable service for many, especially for those who are competing on cost to get the most clients.

If these documents are already in the public domain, then why the restrictions?

Because that's not what JSTOR does. They take publications organize, allow you to do very detailed searches, and download right from them if you pay for their services. Think of it like going into barnes and nobles and buying a copy of Dante's Inferno. The book is in the public domain but you are paying for the paper, formatting, etc.

Edit before the barrage of downvotes: I'm not commenting whether they are right or wrong in not just letting people download them for free. The amount of bandwidth they'd actually use in minimal. Just pointing out they provide a service as well.

Google scholar does exactly the same thing, and does it better.Arxiv does less --- but everything they provide is free. And no-one gives a damn about the lack of power-searching because, like normal people, they search through Google.

If JSTOR REALLY cared about making these papers freely available, they would either donate the corpus to Google Scholar, or run on it as a bare-bones arxiv type model.

Because you know how these things were established in the first place? Please, don't speak on authority if you don't even have access to every single one of these document's history. For all we know, the authors/orgs who made the docs available through JSTOR did it because it was through JSTOR and did not want them to be available anywhere else. Just because it's free doesn't mean it didn't come with some kind of string attached. For example, I could tell you that you can use my tools freely on the condition that only you use them and not that you can lend them to your friends or family without my prior consent.

If these documents are already in the public domain, then why the restrictions?

Because that's not what JSTOR does. They take publications organize, allow you to do very detailed searches, and download right from them if you pay for their services. Think of it like going into barnes and nobles and buying a copy of Dante's Inferno. The book is in the public domain but you are paying for the paper, formatting, etc.

Edit before the barrage of downvotes: I'm not commenting whether they are right or wrong in not just letting people download them for free. The amount of bandwidth they'd actually use in minimal. Just pointing out they provide a service as well.

Exactly. This is just like any other service, like Westlaw, for example. Sure, you can get those court documents, articles and decrees elsewhere and for free, but the fact that they not only aggregate all of this information for you but organize it so that searching for it won't be so unpleasant (and time consuming) makes it a valuable service for many, especially for those who are competing on cost to get the most clients.

If memory serves, Westlaw goes beyond that and adds commentary of their own?

Interesting that they would term this "civil disobedience". This smacks more of the philosophy of DOS attacks as civil disobedience as opposed to say, a sit in on the courthouse lawn. I don't know the back room reasoning that led to the aggressive charges against Aaron, but I don't like ArchiveTeam's brand of protest, either. It may be a bit trite, but two wrongs don't make a right- not in this instance.

If these documents are already in the public domain, then why the restrictions?

Because that's not what JSTOR does. They take publications organize, allow you to do very detailed searches, and download right from them if you pay for their services. Think of it like going into barnes and nobles and buying a copy of Dante's Inferno. The book is in the public domain but you are paying for the paper, formatting, etc.

Edit before the barrage of downvotes: I'm not commenting whether they are right or wrong in not just letting people download them for free. The amount of bandwidth they'd actually use in minimal. Just pointing out they provide a service as well.

Exactly. This is just like any other service, like Westlaw, for example. Sure, you can get those court documents, articles and decrees elsewhere and for free, but the fact that they not only aggregate all of this information for you but organize it so that searching for it won't be so unpleasant (and time consuming) makes it a valuable service for many, especially for those who are competing on cost to get the most clients.

If memory serves, Westlaw goes beyond that and adds commentary of their own?

Yes, that's additional value added service, especially since there's competing (albeit, obscure) sevices out there. Our firm uses Westlaw and Lexisnexis and we're hardly original or unique in that respect in the legal industry. When an attorney has billable time of $400 an hour, as a client, do you REALLY want that person to be trawling the internet to get something and bill you for it?

One simple fact you are ignorant of or you are pretending not to be aware of. The guy had a VALID login to access MIT's system LEGALLY. If all he wanted was access for research he could have simply logged in like everyone else.

He had legitimate access to JSTOR through Harvard, not MIT. But obviously, he knew that what he intended to do was wrong and would potentially jeopardize his Harvard Fellowship, so he went over to MIT instead, where he could get on their network as a guest. He even bought a new laptop and logged in with a pseudonym so he couldn't be linked back to his Harvard account.

If memory serves, Westlaw goes beyond that and adds commentary of their own?

The biggest value added by Westlaw to the cases are Keycite. Same thing with Lexis' Shephards. Those citation checking services analyze the cases, statutes, and regulations cited by the opinions and map the relationships between them. This can prevent the embarrassment of citing case law that had been overruled or made obsolete by later legislation.

Citation checking is where all the "alternative" services falls short. With current software, this is not a task that can be automated. With the ever growing body of case law, it's hard for new entrant to catch up. Outsourcing can reduce the cost somewhat. My suspicion is that whoever can invest that kind of resource to get there would just be as evil as Wexis. My current bet is on LoisLaw, since they are owned by Wolters Kluwer and can spread the cost across their other information resources.

The other value added like headnotes and summaries are nice, but most lawyers can live without them. And I still have users who prefer to Shephardize with the printed version. It's kinda sad that I can not afford to give them that choice anymore.

Swartz will always be remembered as one of the biggest idiots of our time. He knowingly broke the law. He couldn't stand having to go to court for it. So he offed himself without even trying to prove his innocence.

You didn't have to. But the point you are trying to get across is victimization by law. Schwartz was not being victimized by the law. Parks was. Turing was. No matter how you twist it, it's not the same thing.

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I pointed out that there ARE laws for which resisting the law is valid and nobel behavior --- a point you have now conceded is true.

Ah yes. But Schwartz wasn't exactly resisting the law now, was he? He wasn't defying a law that, by it's nature discriminated against him because of his intrinsic physical makeup.

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You you have admitted that your original claim, that anyone who ever breaks the law, whatever the law, whatever their motivation, deserves jail time, is bullshit.

Surely you are confused. I have not made such statements here. If I have, quote it.

Quote:

You can say, if you like, that THIS particular infraction of the law, deserves jail time, but that's not what you were originally claiming.

Considering I have never taken such an absolutist position on law and punishment here on Ars, ever, I think you need to tell me what you think my claim is. There's a disconnect somewhere. My claim is that your premise that led you to compare Schwartz to Rosa Parks and Alan Turing is flawed. That was my claim.

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I would raise comparable NON-CIVIL-RIGHTS issues

Perhaps you should. The others aren't working.

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or releasing supposedly secret information --- Pentagon Paper, or Bradley Manning for example.But I suspect, given everything you've said, that you figure Ellsberg and Manning both deserve to rot in prison; and that if a company wants to release toxins into the wild, and can hide doing so behind a locked fence then you are just fine with them doing so.)

Fine. If you want, we can have that discussion as it's directly relevant to actual experience I have as an S2 officer and a battalion security manager dealing directly with security clearance adjudication, granting and revocation of access from secret all the way up to TS-SCI as well as reading onto special programs. I dealt with federal investigators at both the background investigation end of the business and in support of investigations for individuals who have been in breach of their NDA. Tell me, when was the last time you signed an SF-312 or had to conduct this briefing: http://www.archives.gov/isoo/training/s ... m-312.html

And yes, prison for Manning and Elsworth is perfectly fine with me in this case. Where do you draw the line? Your philosophical difference of opinion and desire for a perverse sort of transparency that has no regard for national security does not trump the clear law regarding intentional release of classified material. In France Manning would face a 7 year and 100,000 Euro fine (it's not just the US that is tough on it unauthorized disclosure).